I just wondered if anyone had tried to use Puppy as the o/s for cluster/grid computing. This is where you have a number of hardware boxes, all linked by network, that can run code in parallel (see http://www.open-mpi.org/) - used to tackle NP-hard problems (i.e. lots and lots of number crunching)?

It strikes me that a thin-puppy, with the right software would be great for this?

It's a while since I looked into this, but what put me off was I was hoping to just use my own gash hardware, but several recommends said 'High speed single core' for the server was more reliable, and matching P3s for clients

Just what I didn't have!
I would have thought matching network speeds more important, but what do I know?
I have a dualie P3/1.1Ghz dell server/scsi h/ds & several P3 667/500Mhz vanilla boxes/SCSI/ATA mixed

Be very interested, as big_bass/MU have just produced Puppy4.1 with SMP on slackware 12.1 kernel, AFAIK

After having checked out the Open MPI FAQ for Compiling MPI applications, it looks as though apps would need recompiled to work with this system.

I would prefer a kernel based system myself (in order for 'anything' to just work 'out of the box'), but it's a neat idea to try as an alternative. Perhaps someone could even implement a "Open MPI T2 build system".

lol, pi is also about what happens when you show a computer how it executes and runs its code; kinda like if you thought about how you think - and then also experienced the neurons flashing and the neurotransmitters moving through the gates / synaptic junctions........the CPU develops biomaterial, then ants live in your computer. Or something.

Rocks is supposed to be good and user-friendly for clusters. I managed to blag a copy from the official servers but haven't got the boxes to test it; not sure if it would run on multiple virtual machines?
Beware, it is a giant download (multiple disks - the link says 1?! maybe DVD then, not CD) and only seems available on slooooow servers, last time I checked,

I came across this apparently dead project, recently, which sparked this post

Quote:

TCPHA implements an architecture for scalable content-aware request distribution in cluster-base servers. It implements Kernel Layer-7 switching based on TCP Handoff for the Linux operating system. Since the overhead of layer-7 switching in user-space is very high, it is good to implement it inside the kernel in order to avoid the overhead of context switching and memory copying between user-space and kernel-space, furthermore, the responses are sent directly to clients, not passing the dispatcher, which will greatly improve the performance of cluster.

TCPHA, inspired by KTCPVS and IPVS, merges their strongpoints. Otherwise, the installation and configuration are very simple.

It is the initial release, debugged on Linux offcial kernel 2.4.20. There are a lot of work to do, such as good scheduling algorithm, better persistent connction handling, implementing it on Windows (i don't think it is so difficult:)). If you are interested in the development, you are very welcome, hopefully we will make it a useful one in the near future.

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